Authors: Alan LeMay
Laurie hardened. “That’s no picture of her,” she said.
He looked up, appalled by the bitterness of her tone.
“It might have been once,” she conceded. “But now it’s nothing but a chromo of a small child. Can’t you count up time at all?”
“She was coming ten,” Mart said. “This was made before.”
“She was eleven,” Laurie said with certainty. “We’ve got the Edwards’ family Bible, and I looked it up. Eleven—and it’s been more than five years! She’s sixteen and coming seventeen right now.”
He had known that Debbie was growing up during all the long time they had hunted for her; but he had never been able to realize it, or picture it. No matter what counting on his fingers told him, he had always been hunting for a little child. But he had no reason to doubt Laurie. He could easily have lost a year in the reckoning some way, so that she had been a year older than he had supposed all the time.
“Deborah Edwards is a woman grown,” Laurie said. “If she’s alive at all.”
He said, “If she’s alive, I’ve got to fetch her home.”
“Fetch what home? She won’t come with you if you find her. They never do.”
Her face was dead white; he stared at it with dis-belief. He still thought it to be a good face, finely made, with beautiful eyes. But now the face was hard as quartz, and the eyes were lighted with the same fires of war he had seen in Amos’ eyes the times he had stomped Comanche scalps into the dirt.
“She’s had time to be with half the Comanche bucks in creation by now.” Laurie’s voice was cold, but not so brutal as her words. “Sold time and again to the highest bidder—and you know it! She’s got savage brats of her own, most like. What are you going to do with them—fetch them home, too? Well, you won’t. Because she won’t let you. She’ll kill herself before she’ll even look you in the face. If you knew anything at all about a woman, you’d know that much!”
“Why, Laurie—” he faltered. “Why, Laurie—”
“You’re not bringing anything back,” she said, and her contempt whipped him across the face. “It’s too late by many years. If they’ve got anything left to sell you, it’s nothing but a—a rag of a female—the leavings of Comanche bucks—”
He turned on her with such a blaze in his eyes that she moved back half a step. But she stood her ground then, and faced up to him; and after a while he looked away. He had hold of himself before he answered her. “I’ll have to see what Amos wants to do.”
“You know what he wants to do. He wants to lead the yellowlegs down on ’em, and punish ’em off the face of creation. He’s never wanted anything else, no matter how he’s held back or pretended. Amos has leaned way backwards for love of his brother’s dead wife—and not from regard for anything else on this earth or beyond it!”
He knew that was true. “That’s why I’ve stayed with him. I told you that a long time ago.”
“Amos has had enough of all this. I knew it the minute he stepped in the house. He’s very patiently gone through all the motions Martha could have asked of him—and way over and beyond. But he’s done.”
“I know that, too,” he said.
She heard the fight go out of his voice, and she changed, softening, but without taking hope. “I wanted you, Mart. I tried to give you everything I’ve got to give. It’s not my fault it wasn’t any good.”
She had shaken him up, so that he felt sick. He couldn’t lay hands on the purposes by which he had lived for so long, or any purpose instead. His eyes ran along the walls, looking for escape from the blind end that had trapped him.
A calendar was there on the wall. It had a strange look, because it picked up beyond the lost years his life had skipped. But as he looked at it he remembered another calendar that hadn’t looked just right. It was a calendar a little child had made for him with a mistake in it, so that her work was wasted; only he hadn’t noticed that then. And he heard the little girl’s voice, saying again the words that he had never really heard her say, but only had been told, and imagined: “He didn’t care.... He didn’t care at all....”
“Do you know,” Laurie said, “what Amos will do if he finds Deborah Edwards? It will be a right thing, a good thing—and I tell you Martha would want it now. He’ll put a bullet in her brain.”
He said, “Only if I’m dead.”
“You think you can outride the yellowlegs—and Amos, too,” she read his mind again. “I suppose you can. And get to Yellow Buckle with a warning. But you can’t outride the Rangers! You’ve been on their list anyway for a long time! Charlie MacCorry is only seven miles away. And I’m going to fetch him— now!”
“You so much as reach down a saddle,” he told her, “and I’ll be on my way in the same half minute. You think there’s a man alive can give me a fourteen-mile start? Get back in that house!”
She stared at him a moment more, then slammed her way out. When she was gone Mart put Debbie’s miniature in his pocket, then retied his packs to be ready for a fast departure in case Laurie carried out her threat; and he left the lamp burning in the bunk -house as he went back to the kitchen.
Laurie did not ride for Charlie MacCorry. As it turned out, she didn’t need to. MacCorry arrived at the Mathisons in the next fifteen minutes, stirred up by the squatter to whom Amos had laid down the law in the Edwards house.
“If you’d come in and faced it out, like you said,” Charlie MacCorry told them, “I don’t believe there’d ever been any case against you at all.”
Four years in the Rangers had done Charlie good. He seemed to know his limitations better now, and accepted them, instead of noisily spreading himself over all creation. Within those limits, which he no longer tried to overreach, he was very sure of himself, and quietly so, which was a new thing for Charlie.
“I said I’d come in when I could. I was on my way to Austin now. Until I run into Lije as I stopped over.”
“He spoke of that,” Aaron Mathison confirmed.
Resentment kept thickening Amos’ neck. He shouldn’t have been asked to put up with this in front of the whole Mathison family. Mrs. Mathison came and went, staying with Lije Powers mostly. But there had been no way to get rid of Tobe and Abner, who kept their mouths shut in the background, but were there, as was Laurie, making herself as inconspicuous as she could.
“And you had my bond of a thousand head of cattle, in token I’d come back,” Amos said. “Or did you pick them up?”
“We couldn’t, very well, because you didn’t own them. Not until the courts declared Deborah Edwards dead, which hasn’t been done. I don’t think Captain Clinton ever meant to pick them up. He was satisfied with your word. Then.”
“Captain, huh?” Amos took note of the promotion. “What are you—a Colonel?”
“Sergeant,” MacCorry said without annoyance. “You’ve been close to three years. Had to come and find you on a tip. Your reputation hasn’t improved any in that time, Mr. Edwards.”
“What’s the matter with my reputation?” Amos was angering again.
“I’ll answer that if you want. So you can see what us fellers is up against. Mark you, I don’t say it’s true.” No rancor could be heard in MacCorry’s tone. He sat relaxed, elbows on the table, and looked Amos in the eye. “They say it’s funny you leave a good ranch, well stocked, to be worked by other men, while you sky-hoot the country from the Nations to Mexico on no reasonable business so far as known. They say you’re almighty free with the scalping knife, and that’s a thing brings costly trouble on Texas. They say you’re a squaw man, who’d sooner booger around with the Wild Tribes than work your own stock; and an owlhoot that will murder to rob.”
“You dare set there and say—”
“I do not. I tell you what’s said. But all that builds up pressure on us. Half the Indian trouble we get nowadays is stirred up by quick-trigger thieves and squaw men poking around where they don’t belong. And your name—names—are a couple that comes up when the citizens holler to know why we don’t do nothing. I tell you all this in hopes you’ll see why I got to do my job. After all, this is a murder case.”
“There ain’t any such murder case,” Amos said flatly.
“I hope you’re right. But that’s not my business. All I know, you stand charged with the robbery and murder of Walker Finch, alias Jerem Futterman. And two other deceased—”
“What’s supposed to become of Yellow Buckle, while—”
“That’s up to Captain Clinton. Maybe he wants to throw the Rangers at Yellow Buckle, with you for guide. You’ll have to talk to him.”
Watching Amos, Mart saw his mind lock, slowly turning him into the inert lump Mart remembered from long ago. He couldn’t believe it at first, it was so long since he had seen Amos look like that.
“I’ll ride there with you, Amos,” Aaron Mathison said. “Sol Clinton will listen to me. We’ll clear this thing once and for all.”
Amos’ eyes were on his empty hands, and he seemed incapable of speech.
“I’m not going in,” Mart said to Charlie MacCorry.
“What?” The young Ranger looked startled.
“I don’t know what Amos is of a mind to do,” Mart said. “I’m going to Yellow Buckle.”
“That there’s maybe the worst thing I could hear you say!”
“All I want to do is get her out of there,” Mart said, “before you hit him, or the cavalry hits. Once you jump him, it’ll be too late.”
“Allowing she’s alive,” Charlie MacCorry said, “which I don’t—you haven’t got a chance in a million to buy her, or steal her, either!”
“I’ve seen a white girl I could buy from an Indian.”
“This one can talk. Letting her go would be like suicide for half a tribe!”
“I got to try, Charlie. You see that.”
“I see no such thing. Damn it, Mart, will you get it through your head—you’re under arrest!”
“What if I walk out that door?”
Charlie glanced past Aaron at Laurie Mathison before he answered. “Now, you ought to know the answer to that.”
Laurie said distinctly, “He means he’ll put a bullet in your back.”
Charlie MacCorry thought about that a moment. “If he’s particular about getting his bullets in front,” he said to her, “he can walk out backwards, can’t he?”
A heavy silence held for some moments before Amos spoke, “It’s up to Sol Clinton, Mart.”
“That’s what I told you,” Charlie said.
Amos asked, “You want to get started?”
“We’ll wait for daylight. Seeing there’s two of you. And allowing for the attitude you take.” He spoke to Aaron. “I’ll take ’em out to the bunk-house; they can get some sleep if they want. I’ll set up with ’em. And don’t get a gleam in your eye,” he finished to Mart. “I was in the bunk house before I come in here—and I put your guns where they won’t be fell over. Now stand up, and walk ahead of me slow.”
The lamp was still burning in the bunk house, but the fire in the stove was cold. Charlie watched them, quietly wary but without tension, while he lighted a lantern for a second light, and set it on the floor well out of the way. He wasn’t going to be left in the dark with a fight on his hands by one of them throwing his hat at the lamp. Amos sat heavily on his bunk; he looked tired and old.
“Pull your boots if you want,” Charlie MacCorry said. “I ain’t going to stamp on your feet, or nothing. I only come for you by myself because we been neighbors from a long way back. I want this as friendly as you’ll let it be.” He found a chair with the back broken off, moved it nearer the stove with his foot, and sat down facing the bunks.
“Mind if I build the fire up?” Mart asked.
“Good idea.”
Mart pawed in the woodbox, stirring the split wood so that a piece he could get a grip on came to the top.
Charlie spoke sharply to Amos. “What are you doing with that stick?”
From the corner of his eye, Mart saw that Amos was working an arm under the mattress on his bunk. “Thought I heard a mouse,” Amos said.
Charlie stood up suddenly, so that the broken chair overturned. His gun came out, but it was not cocked or pointed. “Move slow,” he said to Amos, “and bring that hand out empty.” For that one moment, while Amos drew his hand slowly from under the tick, Charlie MacCorry was turned three-quarters away from Mart, his attention undivided upon Amos.
Mart’s piece of cordwood swung, and caught Mac-Corry hard behind the ear. He rattled to the floor bonily, and lay limp. Amos was kneeling beside him instantly, empty-handed; he hadn’t had anything under the mattress. He rolled Charlie over, got his gun from under him, and had a look at his eyes.
“You like to tore his noggin’ off,” he said. “Lucky he ain’t dead.” “Guess I got excited.”
“Fetch something to make a gag. And my light
reata.”
They didn’t know where the Seven Fingers were as well as they thought they did. West of the Rainy Mountains lay any number of watersheds, according to how far west you went. No creek had exactly seven tributaries. Mart had hoped to get hold of an Indian or two as they drew near. With luck they would have found a guide to take them within sight of Yellow Buckle’s Camp. But Sheridan’s long-awaited campaign had cleared the prairies; the country beyond the North Fork of the Red was deserted. They judged, though, that the Seven Fingers had to be one of two systems of creeks.
Leaving the North Fork they tried the Little Horse thief first. It had nine tributaries, but who could tell how many a Kiowa medicine man would count? This whole thing drained only seventy or eighty square miles; a few long swings, cutting for sign, disposed of it in two days.
They crossed the Walking Wolf Ridge to the Elkhorn. This was their other bet—a system of creeks draining an area perhaps thirty miles square. On the maps it looks like a tree. You could say it has thirty or forty run-ins if you followed all the branches out to their ends; or you could say it has eight, or four, or two. You could say it has seven.
The country had the right feel as they came into it; they believed this to be the place Lije had meant. But now both time and country were running out, and very fast. The murder charge against them might be a silly one, and liable to be laughed out of court. But they had resisted arrest by violence, in the course of which Mart had assaulted an officer with a deadly weapon, intending great bodily harm. Actually all he had done was to swing on that damn fool Charlie MacCorry, but such things take time to cool off, and they didn’t have it. No question now whether they wanted to quit this long search; the search was quitting them. One way or the other, it would end here, and this time forever.